Study: Chinese Open-Source Model Downloads Surpass US, Led by Qwen
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-07-04
A paper on open-source model adoption reveals that Chinese models, led by Qwen, are now dominating. China surpassed the US in open-source model downloads in the summer of 2025; by March 2026, Chinese models tracked 1.15 billion cumulative downloads versus 723 million for US models. This shift is largely driven by Qwen. Covering multiple sizes (especially small models that are cheap to run and iterated frequently), it has become the default base for many developers. DeepSeek is also making an impact but hasn't comprehensively dominated the ecosystem like Qwen.
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